Mr. Buck:
Next you'll be saying that students who choose an Andover education are also being penalized by the government. Or any of a number of other elite schools.
The government provides access to an education which, in accordance with the establishment clause, does not advance any kind of religion. If students, for whatever reason, choose not to avail themselves of that opportunity, it is their choice to do so and not the government's responsibility.
As far as being penalized, it just doesn't work that way. I will never have kids; am I penalized by still paying for public education? No. It's not a pay-as-you-go-get-what-you-pay system.
Re the Mondale-Coleman vote, in MN we do have paper ballots that are just scanned/transmitted by the machines. Am I wrong, or isn't that what folks are saying should be the standard?
No one is probably reading this anymore, which is just fine by me. But after last night, I had to write something, just to weigh in.
Most of these comments have referred to the issue in a very abstracted way. "If the government comes to take your rights," or "if you need to defend yourself." But in my neighborhood, this discussion is anything but.
Last night, at about 3 in the morning, some guys had a brief but heated argument in the park near my house and then fired maybe 14 shots. Then they took off. Luckily no one was hurt (that I know of). I even called 911.
I say 'even' because I don't call 911 for fewer than 3 shots anymore. It's just not worth it: I hear 1-3 shots outside at night (I'm an insomniac so I'm up late most nights) at least once a week. More like 3-4 times a week in the summer.
Last fall a little girl was killed in her home, which was not too far from mine, by stray gunfire while she was doing homework. We ourselves have come home to find a bullet hole in our office and the bullet lodged in the wall near the filing cabinet.
A bicyclist was shot dead just last week 4 blocks down the street from our house, and another woman was wounded. A car was also shot up--had the driver been in it, maybe someone else would have been hit too.
So for us the proliferation of handguns in low-income Minneapolis is anything but academic. It's poison.
As for solutions, I am quite interested in the public health model, but I am also curious about the strategy adopted by many cities to sue gun manufacturers for dumping and fraud. Though many of those cases have been dismissed, a cursory glance at the Violence Policy Center http://www.vpc.org/litigate.htm seems to indicate that some are proceeding. I applaud their creativity. And if the manufacturers have been engaging in fraudulent or dumping practices, I hope the cities nail them to the wall.
Otherwise, maybe a year-long moratorium on handgun manufacture with a concurrent buyback/meltdown program?
Or my favorite, from Chris Rock: a $5000 tax per bullet, at which price there are no dead bystanders.
Madeleine & Kevin:
I remember that during the first Gulf War, Barbara Ehrenrich said in a speech that she had her research staff comb the '60s & '70s newspapers looking for accounts of soldiers being spit on by anti-Vietnam War folx. According to her, the only actual verifiable spit-on soldier was Ron Kovic, when Vietnam Vets Against the War went to the Republican convention in Florida and someone there spit on him.
FWIW.
Sigh. I should never write when I'm this tired. FWIW, by 'yay that it was this easy so far' I of course meant 'yay that it got no worse than it has so far when it could have gotten even more horrible.' In no way did I mean to dismiss the suffering that's been all too common, or the sad fact that it ever got to this....
Graydon: I was struck by her clean/crispness, too. A tiny suspicious part of me momentarily considered whether she might be part of the Telegenic Squad that gets called for heavy photo ops. :)
Patrick: Did you not predict just a few days ago that De Genova was going to be the next bludgeon used to beat up on the left?
Julian: Here's something to consider: De Genova, who (as Avram pointed out) is an Assistant Professor (ie, untenured), said something stupid. But even without the hiding from death threats thing, I'm not sure that you can make any arguments on his teaching based on a couple of dumb comments. Plenty of profs have political opinions, speak them publicly, and maybe even say stupid things about politics...but teaching is different. Most academics I know bend over backward to present a broad range of perspectives and information in their classes.
So all the wrangling about Coulter's influence aside, I think you can't automatically extrapolate De Genova's class content from a couple of statements.
David:
I just assumed that since she's in Basra she's British. Anyone know for sure?
Yay that it was this easy so far. Triple yay that Saddam's regime is kaput. Hosanna!
When the egregious nature of the current administration began to sink in soon after the inauguration, my sweetie (who voted for Gore but is lefty enough to have gritted his teeth) said, "now I know why the Bolsheviks killed the SRs." Not meaning he wanted to kill anyone, by any means, but that you save a special rage for those friends whose blades you see protruding from your sternum. Whether or not that was the intent, or even the factual truth, I think the reason this discussion gets so heated, and persists so long, has a lot to do with that sense of betrayal.
Because I live in Minnesota, I seriously considered voting for Nader (until Bush's MN poll numbers got scary close to Gore's) to give the Greens major-party status/funding. I even had a lawn sign up for a while. But in hindsight, my vote would have been wasted in that respect too. What did the Greens in MN *do* with that major party status? They ran a pro-war wacko *against Wellstone*, ran an OK gubernatorial candidate who still didn't pull enough votes to keep their major party cred, and didn't put (to my mind) nearly enough effort into statewide IRV.
So what do the Greens in MN have to show for 2000? 2 City Council members in Minneapolis (which has nonpartisan elections). This begs the question: perhaps the Greens should have kept their focus on that local grassroots scale and *built a movement*, and an *apparatus* that would have been ready to deal with statewide success by the time they got to that level. Certainly they blew everything the Nader candidacy got them.
For the record, Guv "The Mind" Ventura had sparse coattails too, consisting entirely of his fit-o-pique Senate appointment and 15 percent of the vote in '02 to the high-profile former Democratic Congressman who ran for governor as the Independence Party candidate.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 22 |
Total: 22 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Stefanie Murray:
Show all comments by Stefanie Murray.